500 episodes listed below
Travel stories with borders, memory, and consequence.
The Maverick Show treats travel as a doorway into lived experience, not a checklist of places. Recent conversations move from regenerative tourism in Costa Rica to Afro-Latinx identity, queer travel, Palestine, depression, diaspora, and the small decisions that shape a life abroad.
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The Maverick Show is a long-form travel conversation series about lives shaped by borders, migration, identity, and choice. Its center is human story. Recent episodes spend less time selling destinations and more time asking what travel does to a person’s sense of responsibility, belonging, and solidarity. Priyanka Surio’s conversations bring that approach into clear focus. Her episodes move from South India and the Indian diaspora to Ghana, Ethiopia, Antarctica, and Indigenous communities in Costa Rica, often returning to the discipline of listening before entering someone else’s space. The show treats that listening as part of the travel itself. It can be practical, too. Conversations cover lower-footprint travel, conservation work, trains, buses, walking, packing, digital nomad life, and the everyday logistics of staying mobile. But the practical advice rarely floats free of ethics. A discussion of carbon offsets becomes a question about building habits instead of outsourcing responsibility. A visit to a Bri-Bri community becomes a story about trust, invitation, and restraint. Dash Harris’s episodes give the series a sharper political and cultural edge. Travel becomes a way to witness Black Latinx life, anti-Blackness in Latin America, the mestizaje myth, diaspora community, and the gap between ideology and lived experience. Cara Laban’s episodes widen the emotional range again. They move from depression and reinvention in Thailand to queer travel, Jewish anti-Zionism, protest, Brazil’s Carnival, Tasmania, and the strange comedy of road-trip failure. The tone stays warm even when the material is heavy. Guests are given room to tell full stories, and the conversation often arrives at its point through detail rather than summary. Matt Bowles also appears as an interview subject in an episode about Palestine and collective action, reinforcing the show’s interest in travel as part of a larger political life. The Maverick Show works best for listeners who want the world described through encounters, contradictions, and memory. It is reflective without being stiff, personal without becoming aimless, and much more interested in what travel asks of people than in what it lets them consume.
Made for: For listeners drawn to long-form travel conversations that connect place with identity, activism, culture, and personal reinvention. It especially suits digital nomads, diaspora listeners, socially conscious travelers, and anyone tired of surface-level destination talk.
What sets it apart: The series stands apart by letting personal travel stories stretch into questions of power, race, sustainability, protest, mental health, and community trust. It favors lived testimony and reflective follow-up over polished itinerary advice.
The Maverick Show is a global travel podcast about what really happens when people cross borders and build lives across cultures. Hosted by full-time world traveler Matt Bowles, each episode features intimate, unfiltered conversations (often over a bottle of wine) exploring the human stories behind global travel and what the journey teaches us about the world and ourselves. Guests include expats, digital nomads, women and diaspora storytellers, worldschooling families, and human rights advocates, all sharing travel stories that are funny, moving, and deeply human. In addition to hearing about extraordinary places and the people who live there, you’ll learn what it’s really like to move abroa…
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Matt Bowles turns guest travel stories into practical conversations about community, identity, responsibility, and the consequences of crossing borders.
The Maverick Show follows travel beyond the itinerary, using Matt Bowles's guest interviews to examine how people build community, understand identity, and move responsibly across borders.
A Carnival parade goes until sunrise; you're still watching for the politics in the floats.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A riverbank invitation turns reflective travel into a quiet lesson in earned trust.
Priyanka Surio's conversation settles into focus at a riverbank near the Costa Rica-Panama border, where a Bri-Bri leader first asks what the visitors intend, care about, and do.
A thoughtful travel episode connects protest, carbon responsibility, and seeing places more slowly on foot.
Priyanka Suryo frames travel as a form of responsibility, beginning with protest and the hard lessons of police brutality, pepper spray, gassing, and a young Black woman offering milk in a moment of solidarity.
A reflective journey from Andhra Pradesh family roots toward a wider practice of listening across the Indian diaspora.
Travel here is framed as a careful way into diaspora, with Priyanka Surya describing movement through India as something guided by listening first and speaking only when invited.
Kara Laban recalls a tense protest escape and Carnival's night-long parade of samba schools, costumes, and towering floats.
Kara Laban's strongest travel story begins at a peaceful protest, where police kettle the crowd, throw smoke bombs, and fire a rubber bullet that hits someone in the hand. As officers close in, she follows a new friend toward a tall fence and snags her jeans at the top.
A candid travel conversation about depression, roadside improvisation, and finding a more livable way forward.
Cara Laban recounts a bleak moment in Pai, Thailand, where depression, work she hates, and the beauty of Pai Canyon force a stark realization. She could jump, but she does not want to.
A first altitude hike, volcano-made pizza, and a thoughtful case for travel as a way to listen across lives.
Guatemala gives the conversation its clearest image: Sojourner White hiking Acatenango for six hours on her first altitude hike, then heading back out two days later while still healing to take on Pacaya with a guide and eat pizza cooked on the volcano.
A thoughtful episode on how community can make solo travel feel more sustainable.
Janessa Klatt's conversation with Matt Bowles is strongest when it treats solo travel less as independence for its own sake and more as a practice sustained by repeat connection.
Anti-racist education research, brought to practice.
Black politics without soft edges.
Black history with present-tense stakes.
Grassroots Black activism, live and unfiltered.
Blunt faith talk under pressure.
Host Matt Bowles interviews Janessa Klatt, a digital nomad and podcast manager from Winnipeg, Canada.
An Iranian activist discusses using the World Cup platform to protest the Iranian regime and amplify the Woman Life Freedom movement.
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Dan Demsky discusses co-founding Unbound Merino, summiting Cotopaxi, and the value of stillness, sharing lessons from pushing through extreme challenges.
Etelle Higonnet discusses the prevalence of slave labor in Brazil's coffee industry and the lack of consumer awareness.
Matt Bowles discusses the importance of collective action in social change and promotes his podcast and free guide on building a location-independent business.
Host Matt Bowles interviews Sojourner White about her global travel experiences, focusing on train journeys like the California Zephyr and Jose Cuervo Express tequila train.
On The Maverick Show, Matt Bowles interviews Priyanka Surio about regenerative travel across South India, Antarctica, and the Costa Rica-Panama border.
["On The Maverick Show, Matt Bowles and Priyanka Suryo unpack why travel as a hobby and industry can be largely extractive.", "Priyanka Suryo defines sustainable travel as reducing harm and regenerative travel as creating a noticeable positive impact on people, cultures, places, and creatures.", "She builds a framework around four mindsets, finding truth, open-mindedness, resilience, and giving back, plus four world-changing forces, reducing carbon footprint, promoting cultural awareness, protecting wildlife and biodiversity, and fueling the local economy.", "Her examples come from Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, India, Ethiopia, and Morocco, where she talks about wages, public beaches, turtle conservation, trains, sanctuaries, and local markets."]
The Maverick Show interview with Priyanka Suryo moves from Mulberry, Florida, to Budapest, Hyderabad, Addis Ababa, and Washington, D.C.
Dash Harris discusses anti-Blackness in Latin America, the Mestizaje myth, and her visit to Equatorial Guinea, emphasizing the transformative power of face-to-face travel experiences.
Dash Harris discusses Black Latinx identity, diaspora storytelling, and co-founding AfroLatinx Travel, emphasizing community and following one's path.
Cara Laban describes a Los Angeles Roe v.
Kara Laban says she was on a Queens train platform thinking, "I could jump," before booking Australia six months later.